Hello! I’m writing to you from just outside of gate 32 at the Sydney domestic airport just waiting for the final boarding call for my flight to Brisbane. I’ll be on a panel at 5.30PM tonight at the Brisbane Writers Festival talking about my book if you wanna come along!

Oops! They just paged me. (Sorry for any typos - sent this one in a rush)

The News

Apple is banning apps because Trump doesn’t like them

Apple has removed an app that archives footage of American immigration agents doing dodgy shit (404Media, $). Previously, Apple and Google have taken down applications like ICEBlock from US app stores that allowed users to track their covert and often violent immigration raids, citing rules that supposedly prohibit apps that could harm “target groups”…. Which apparently includes ICE agents (MigrantInsider)…. But the newly removed app Eyes Up is only about saving content like TikTok videos or news articles and has a delay to stop it from being used to track agents in real-time. 

The Sizzle:  It’s fucking crazy what’s happening in the US. For as long as we’ve had the modern internet, we’ve accepted with piggybacking off US laws because 1) tech companies are based there and 2) their approach was essentially like a “regulation starter kit” that we would top up with our own laws, so it didn’t matter that much. (Obviously it’s a lot more complicated than this and there’s a lot of things influenced by this, but on a surface level it’s more or less correct).

But, like I said, this is crazy. Like many parts of our lives, it’s clear that we have to start thinking differently about the United States and what its increasingly authoritarian, fascist-looking government means for our technology. We need to start building technology and systems that aren’t reliant on the US — unless we want to live like Trump is our president, too.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Exposing 100,000s of Australians’ health data online will set ya back about $6 million

The company behind a pathology clinic that exposed 223,000 Australians’ data is the lucky first recipient of civil penalties under Australia’s privacy laws (ITNews). Back in 2022, data from MedLab Pathology, including health information, Medicare card numbers and other personal info, was posted on the dark web following a cyber attack. Three years later, a court has agreed to accept a $5.8 million penalty and for clinics’ owner, Australian Clinical Labs, to pay the Information Commissioner’s costs (OAIC). Worth noting — penalties were capped at $2.22 million per contravention because they happened before the law was updated to allow up to $50m per contravention.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Dumb people using AI is going to end dumbly

Two interesting AI stories that came across my desk today:

The Sizzle: A significant amount of ire that’s being directed at AI use and AI users comes back to the fact that people are using it in really stupid, irresponsible ways. In some of these cases, I don’t think there’s much you can do (like the missing boy image is clearly the result of an extremely dumb, selfish person), but in other cases, universities, companies should know better. All that being said, there’s clearly something inherent about the capabilities and power of AI technology that lends itself to “people now flippantly doing things that would have been much harder before” that is at the core of a lot of these awful uses of the tech.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of the world:

Discuss these links in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Oh, Also

It’s legal to give birth while streaming on Twitch

Content moderation is so hard at scale, and there’s so many edge cases that you can never really know if the banhammer will come down on you. That’s why Twitch streamer Fandy must have been relieved that the Twitch CEO dropped into the chat of her stream while she gave birth (The Verge), seemingly blessing the broadcast. Oh, also, that the baby was born alive and well. 

2025, man. 

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electrical & electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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The Sizzle is created on Gadigal land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.